How do you organize your lightroom library (libraries)?
Since I am a casual photographer, I have a single huge library with all my photos in it. Then I create smart collections to be able to find my photos faster.
For instance, I have a smart collection named Trips with the places I have been under it as sub-collections. Some of these photos are also tagged as Family, which is another collection.
My concern is that in a few years this collection will grow so much that the software will not perform so well anymore. But, if I split my libary into many libraries, I will have to hunt for the photos I am looking for.
What is your approach?
>> Also asked by Igor Oks >>
How do you use catalogs in Lightroom?
Or perhaps, how do you organize your photos in Lightroom 3?
I got a feeling that the way I do it is not very convenient.
The flow that I do on every new set of photos is:
Copy the photos from the camera to a new folder on the HD (e.g. to C:\Photos\Bobs_bday_2010).
Create a New Catalog, and save it to the same directory where the photos are.
Import all photos from the directory to this catalog.
Does it make sense? Should I use catalogs for photos organization, or should I rather use something else? Should I create a new catalog for each new set of photos, and where to save all these catalogs?
Thank you!
Answer
Keep everything in one library. Lightroom 3 has overcome some of the past performance issues with large catalogs, so the benefits of having a good search ability dictate a single library.
I use a lot of Smart Collections that are based on metadata and workflow steps. I also create standard collections for each client job that I shoot.
Caption and keyword anything that's worth keeping.
Much like GMail showed the world that powerful search is better than a jillion manually-managed folders for email, good DAM tools like Lightroom or Aperture reveal that keywording and search is more efficient than manually managing collections and folders.
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